As far as we’ve come with automated data capture, one of the most important ways of collecting data is still manual entry. This is the data that sales reps enter into records within your CRM to capture all of the information that comes from actually talking with prospects. The problem is, sales reps don’t want to spend their time entering information into their CRM: they want to spend their time selling. As a result, data is often entered sparingly, not entered at all (or worst of all) entered incorrectly.
This can be a huge problem for marketers who rely on the data generated by the sales reps to inform many of their decisions. Maintaining strict data entry policies and goals that align sales and marketing are key to ensuring your data is both consistent and accurate.
Train your reps early. Driving better data entry practices begins during the onboarding process. Instilling values of data hygiene early on goes a long way in driving adoption. Enforcing data policies or adding new ones becomes much more difficult after sales reps get comfortable with the sales process as it is.
Limit their options. This holds value for those entering data as well as those reporting on it. Avoiding open text fields as much as possible makes the data entry process much easier on the sales reps. Instead, provide them with radio buttons, checkboxes, or drop down menus. This also makes analysis much easier as you don’t have to create your own cohorts or try and decipher what the reps quickly typed into the text boxes.
Set field requirements at various stages – just not too many. This is a very complex strategy requiring the balancing of many different opinions. On one hand, there is marketing and the management team who want as many required fields as possible. On the other, there is the sales team who does not want to spend hours of their time populating their CRM records every time they update a stage. Finding the right balance requires participation from all parties to ensure everybody understands and agrees with the policies put in place.
Integrate with your other tools. This should be done as often as possible to reduce the amount of times manual data entry is required. By integrating tools such as email and phone systems with your database, you can automatically capture these activities so that your reps don’t have to.
Show them the value. This is by far the most important strategy of all. By showing your sales reps the value that they can gain from better data entry, you have the best chance of them following the policies you put into place. CRM systems were created to help sales teams sell better and smarter, and having as much data in these systems as possible does just that. Show them how the data they enter can inform their own sales strategies, as well as the resulting analytics and insights derived from the data.
If you want to discover more strategies for simplifying the data entry process and improving the efficiency of your sales reps, watch our on-demand webinar: How Inside Sales Teams Optimize Performance in a BYOD World.
